We’ve covered Auditorium before here on TSA, when it received a fancy lick of paint and a PSN release (well, for those in North America) as ‘Auditorium HD’. It’s now the turn of the PSP to get a slice of this wonderful pie, albeit once again in North America.

The premise of the PSP game is exactly the same as the versions that precedes it. Each ‘level’ is actually a song that has been broken down into several pieces, and it’s down to you to fulfil certain criteria to merge these pieces and form a wondrous symphony.

Auditorium requires you to funnel a constantly moving flow of light into a series of boxes places strategically around each level. Each box represents a certain instrument or sound, which is triggered as soon as the light starts to fill it. This sound builds and builds the more boxes you fill, until the level’s completed piece of music is playing, at which point you can move on. Subsequently, the second the light is diverted away from the boxes the sounds begin to fade, until they disappear entirely.

Of course, directing the flow of light so that it can be in several places at once is no easy feat, and every level has a set of controls to help you out. The most common control is the ‘directional arrow’, and placing one of these over the light stream will see the flow veer off in the direction the arrow is facing. This is Auditorium at its most basic, and the first few levels will see you mastering these arrows.

The game then introduces splitter like objects, and when you aim the light flow at these it will split it right down the middle, causing it to go off in different directions. Eventually you will be asked to use a number of different icons, each affecting the flow in a different way. One, for example, will cause the flow to continuously circle the icon until it resembles the planet Saturn.

Just when you have all of that sussed, the ante is upped as the boxes become colour specific, requiring you to first pass the flow through a relevant coloured filter. Juggling this many tasks at once can get unbelievably tricky, but never unfairly so.

As mentioned in Nofi’s Auditorium HD review, the game can be somewhat hypnotic as you watch these multicoloured flecks of light dance across the screen, whilst listening (preferably through headphones) to a beautiful soundtrack. This is perhaps the first ever game where instead of straight away going to the next level, I’ve actually sat back and listened to the level’s completed piece of music; feeling relaxed and rather content. It has an uncanny knack of making even the most stressed of moods disappear.

As always, there are some downsides. Whilst undeniably pretty, the PSP version lacks the sparkle of its PSN and even iPod counterpart. The controls can also be a bit fiddly at times, especially when you have multiple icons under your command.

Pros

• Perfect difficulty curve
• Wonderful soundtrack
• Hypnotic to watch

Cons

• Rough edges
• Occassional fiddly controls

So there we have it, a much shorter review than I normally like to do, but there’s nothing to say about Auditorium that hasn’t already been said in other TSA articles. At times it resembles an experience rather than a game, and I hope it makes its way over to our side of the pond soon. The more people that play this game, the better.

Score: 8/10